By Fred Hiatt
Monday, September 3, 2007

We seem to have entered a season of let's-make-excuses for public education. So it's striking when an educator on the front lines, the superintendent of schools in Prince George's County, says, no, thanks -- don't give me that option.

The superintendent is John Deasy, and we'll come back to his ideas for improved, but still serious, accountability in a moment. But first, consider the backdrop.

On the campaign trail, the mantra of Democratic candidates is to mock having children "filling in those little bubbles," as Hillary Clinton said to the National Education Association. Translation: Let's not test whether our children can read or, if we do, let's not let the tests count for much.

In Congress, Republican legislators decry federal "intrusion" into states' rights in education. Translation: Don't "intrude" into our right to dumb down tests so that our schools won't look so bad -- and so we won't have to spend more on educating poor children.

Last week, Maryland's superintendent of schools, until then a stalwart defender of accountability, proposed an alternative route to high school graduation for students who can't pass ninth- and 10th-grade proficiency tests. Now they'll be able to complete "projects" instead. No doubt employers, confronted with graduates who can't read or compute, will be impressed with cool-looking dioramas of Aztec temples.

Meanwhile, Virginia officials whine that they're being judged not only by how well they educate their easy cases but also by whether they make progress with the bigger challenges -- in this case, pupils for whom English is a second language.

All of them say they're for accountability. But when accountability starts to bite -- when schools are shown to be performing more poorly than claimed, when high school diplomas actually depend on high school learning -- the politicians look for wiggle room. Too often they're responding to interest groups that should know better: teachers and principals unions, school boards, superintendents.

So how refreshing to hear John Deasy say, without equivocation, that President Bush's No Child Left Behind law should be extended -- improved, yes, but extended without attenuation. "It's made visible the invisible," he says -- meaning school systems no longer can fail their poorest students while boasting of overall achievement -- and it has confirmed that "all youth have a civil right to a qualified teacher."

More than half the 134,000 students in the Prince George's system are poor, and many are first- or second-generation Americans. The graduation rate is far too low, the number of failing schools too high.

But in his first year as superintendent -- he began in May 2006 -- Deasy helped coax more schools out of troubled status than fell in. Test scores rose, and Advanced Placement courses were added in every high school -- "so that," Deasy explained at a school-year kickoff rally, "rigor is never an accident of geography again in this county."

Some observers worry that Deasy is doing too much too fast: introducing International Baccalaureate programs to middle schools, carving out small high schools with more autonomy, devising ways to pay higher salaries to teachers who take on the hardest tasks and deliver the best results. The alternative to speed, he answers, is to tell some children that reform will come too late for them, something he's unwilling to do.

Deasy wants changes to No Child Left Behind. Tests should measure the progress that children make year to year, rather than taking snapshots of the fourth- or eighth-grade classes every year; that's a crucial distinction, particularly for systems where children move in and out with frequency. The law should reach into higher education, to stimulate the preparation of more and better-trained teachers. It should bring some common sense to the definition of "qualified teacher," Deasy says, so that he doesn't have to reject a Goddard Space Flight Center retiree who wants to teach physics. And it should bring accountability not only to the classroom but to the back office, too -- to the personnel and purchasing offices that every system depends on.

But dumbing down tests, winking at students who fail them, giving a pass to teachers who can't teach and schools that don't deliver -- who benefits from that? Not the youth who will end up credentialed but unemployable. And not those school officials who have enough confidence in themselves and their teachers to welcome fair judgment.

fredhiatt@washpost.com